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Ghetto, forced labor camp, concentration camp: All of the elements of the National Socialists' policies of annihilation were to be found in Riga. This first analysis of the Riga ghetto and the nearby camps of Salaspils and Jungfernhof addresses all aspects of German occupation policy during the Second World War. Drawing upon a broad array of sources that includes previously inaccessible Soviet archives, postwar criminal investigations, and trial records of alleged perpetrators, and the records of the Society of Survivors of the Riga Ghetto, the authors have produced an in-depth study of the Riga ghetto that never loses sight of the Latvian capital's place within the overall design of Nazi policy and the all-of-Europe dimension of the Holocaust.NOMINATED FOR THE RAPHAEL LEMKIN AWARD BY THE INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF GENOCIDE"With its …[over thousand] detailed and expansive footnotes drawing on twenty-four different archive collections in eight countries and three continents and an enormous secondary literature, this is one of the best researched regional studies of the Holocaust ever to appear. It is helped by the fact that the authors are also always so cognizant of what was happening elsewhere in Europe at the same time and thus frequently draw out the relationship between seemingly haphazard local decisions and trends across Europe…Indeed, the way in which the book 'makes sense' of complex institutional behavior is at times breathtaking…The precision in the detail and the scope of the contextualization make this one of the more important works to appear on the Holocaust in recent years." · English Historical Review"This very readable and well documented study fills an important gap in the Holocaust literature: it offers insight into the microcosm reflecting the entire terrifying and murderous scenario of the SS State." · Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"[This] excellent study of the Riga ghetto, informed by Eastern European sources and available now in English translation, provides a precise and ghastly description of what [the liquidation] meant for the local Jews. With laudable thoroughness, they describe the organized shooting of Jews, the first form of industrial-scale mass murder." · The New York Review of Books

These fifteen journeys—fourteen of them within Poland—take six years, 1940–1946. The distances vary. Sometimes they are minimal, as short as a two-stop bus ride in a city, or a twenty-minute walk, and sometimes they are longer—much longer. The traveler is a young girl, who we meet at age seven. Along the way, she loses her home, her family, her name, her hair, and finally, her fear.Two things help her on her journeys during these difficult years: some lessons from her parents and a large share of luck, which never deserts her.

The story of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is well known: the expansionist Communists overwhelmed a poor country as a means of reaching a warm-water port on the Persian Gulf. Afghan mujahideen upset their plans, holding on with little more than natural fighting skills, until CIA agents came to the rescue with American arms. Humiliated in battle, the Soviets hastily retreated. It is a great story-but it never happened. In this brilliant, myth-busting account, Rodric Braithwaite, the former British ambassador to Moscow, challenges much of what we know about the Soviets in Afghanistan. He provides an inside look at this little-understood episode, using first-hand accounts and piercing analysis to show the war as it was fought and experienced by the Russians. The invasion was a defensive response to a chaotic situation in the Soviets' immediate neighbor. They intended to establish a stable, friendly government, secure the major towns, and train the police and armed forces before making a rapid exit. But the mission escalated, as did casualties. Braithwaite does not paint the occupation as a Russian triumph. To the contrary, he illustrates the searing effect of the brutal conflict on soldiers, their families, and the broader public, as returning veterans struggled to regain their footing back home. Now available in paperback, Braithwaite carries readers through these complex and momentous events, capturing those violent and tragic days as no one has done before.

The book brings together many of the best known commentators and scholars who write about former Yugoslavia. The essays focus on the post-Yugoslav cultural transition and try to answer questions about what has been gained and what has been lost since the dissolution of the common country. Most of the contributions can be seen as current attempts to make sense of the past and help cultures in transition, as well as to report on them.The volume is a mixture of personal essays and scholarly articles and that combination of genres makes the book both moving and informative. Its importance is unique. While many studies dwell on the causes of the demise of Yugoslavia, this collection touches upon these causes but goes beyond them to identify Yugoslavia's legacy in a comprehensive way. It brings topics and writers, usually treated separately, into fruitful dialog with one another.

"This is an impressive collection of essays on a neglected subject. It is very useful to have a book that is focused in important ways on what happened at the local level. Very little attention has been devoted by historians to the themes under discussion in this collection. The essays are refreshingly free of ideological bias."--Richard Clogg, Oxford University"This collection of exciting essays discusses the tragedy of Greece in the wartime and postwar years. Its success is due to the widely recognized expertise of the editor, the excellence of contributors, the partial opening of the Greek archives, the more democratic atmosphere in Greece, and the end of the Cold War. The wide variety of authors--ranging from young to well-established historians and including at least one former participant in the civil war--is a further asset. It reads well and is a significant contribution to scholarship."--Istvan Deak, Columbia University

"This is not a psychodrama. Rather, this is a sociopolitical tragedy, extremely valuable, deeply researched, and fascinating. There is very little that is as important as this book about any of the top communist leaders other than the most famous ones such as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. . . .The subject is so important, the book so well done and so revealing, and the human interest so compelling, Levy's book will become one of the essential works on the history of communism in Eastern Europe."--Daniel Chirot, author of Modern Tyrants"This outstanding, thought-provoking political biography of one of the most prominent figures of European communism offers an original and balanced approach to Pauker's contradictory role in the history of both Romanian and international communism. . . . Engagingly written and very convincingly structured, this is not a dry historical account but a vivid reconstruction of a turbulent political life."--Vladimir Tismaneanu, author of Fantasies of Salvation

In turn-of-the-century Vienna, Karl Kraus created a bold new style of media criticism, penning incisive satires that elicited both admiration & outrage. Kraus's spectacularly hostile critiques often focused on his felloe Jewish journalists, which brought him a reputation as the quintessential self-hating Jew. This book overturns this view with unprecedented force & sophistication, showing how Kraus's criticisms form the center of a radical model of German-Jewish self-fashioning, & how that model developed in concert with Kraus's modernist journalistic style.